Is Ethnic Cleansing of Christians Happening in Northern Nigeria?

Jun 5, 2017

ICC Note

In this article, Douglas Murray accuses the Nigerian authorities of being complicit in the ethnic cleansing of Nigeria’s northern Christians by Fulani Militia. Villages across northern Nigeria are systematically burned and its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away. Murray claims that the Nigerian press fails to report these attacks or obscures them and Christians in the south feel little solidarity with their co-religionists. Additionally he claims that the military or part of the military actively aids the militants by dropping arms and other supplies to the Fulani tribes. It is clear that the international community has not given enough attention to the ethnic cleansing of Christians from northern Nigeria allowing these massacres to continue.

06/04/2017 Nigeria (Vanguard) – Another day in Northern Nigeria, another Christian village reeling from an attack by the Muslim Fulani herdsmen who used to be their neighbours – and who are now cleansing them from the area. The locals daren’t collect the freshest bodies. Some who tried earlier have already been killed, spotted by the waiting militia and hacked down or shot. The Fulani are watching everything closely from the surrounding mountains. Every week, their progress across the Northern states of Plateau and Kaduna continues.

Every week, more massacres – another village burned, its church razed, its inhabitants slaughtered, raped or chased away. A young woman, whose husband and two children have just been killed in front of her, tells me blankly, ‘Our parents told us about these people. But we lived in relative peace and we forgot what they said.’For the outside world, what is happening to the Christians of Northern Nigeria is both beyond our imagination and beneath our interest. These tribal-led villages, each with their own ‘paramount ruler’, were converted by missionaries in the 19th and 20th centuries. But now these Christians… sense that they have become unsympathetic figures, perhaps even an embarrassment, to the West. The international community pretends that this situation is a tit-for-tat problem, rather than a one-sided slaughter.